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Psychology, the science of mind and behavior, permeates business on many dimensions--- from negotiation to sales to product design. In it's simplest form, business is psychology. Below are three strategies we can learn from recent research in psychology.

1. Labor Leads to Love

Sometimes you just need to put the customer to work. Researchers have seen that a bit of sweat equity can actually increase the perceived value of the product. Just consider Build-a-Bear or Ikea, two phenomenons of cheap products that are loved and valued.

Of course, there's a limit to the labor. For instance, a customer must feel competent and in control. If their Ikea table falls apart, they'll be blaming the Swedes and not their do-it-yourself abilities.

When people exert sufficient effort in some task and successfully complete that task, they will experience a feeling of having engaged in fruitful labor, which will then drive increased valuation of the fruits of labor - the products they have crated.

2. Let Them Know You're Working, Even if You're Just a Website

People don't mind waiting if they know you're working hard. Just think about Starbucks and their unnecessarily long and complicated cappuccino maker. It's not that they couldn't figure out how to make one faster, it's that Starbucks knew customers attributed more value to perceived barista effort.

This concept was applied to online products in an Harvard Business School research paper that looked at search features. The Web is unusual in that automating a service actually shields customers from the underlying complexity of the service. But there are steps product managers and designers can take to enhance the perceived value.

The most compelling experiment looked at search time for travel websites. They found that customers actually prefer websites that require waiting as long as they demonstrate their labor, like a tally or progress bar. (Think: the way Kayak displays a continually changing list airline sites being searched). Of course, a pleasant wait experience won't help you if you're search results suck.

3. Let Them Vote

Customers who are empowered to select the features or products to be marketed, such as M&M color, show stronger demand for the underlying products. The concept of voting helps consumers develop a psychological ownership of the product. But if the outcome doesn't reflect the consumers' preferences or if the consumer didn't feel qualified to make a decision, then the empowerment-product demand effect diminishes.